In a recent NY Times article, Social Networking’s Next Phase, the future of online social networking is discussed. It seems that the online social networking craze will be headed in a different direction, according to sources such as Cisco and the co-creator of Netscape. Because Facebook and MySpace are immensely popular networks, many people with many dissimilar interests end up bunched together. These systems are not designed to enhance flexibility, which results in difficulty when trying to gather small groups of people with similar interests together. The existing social networks limit the power of the individual and restrict people from building their own worlds. The future of social networking seems to lie in the smaller, more flexible networks such as Tribe.net, where users have more power to build their own communities. Eventually, the experts say that social networking sites will become as common as any other web site.

Considering the popularity of MySpace and Facebook, this is much more than a minor shift in the interests of the users. If as many of these social networking websites pop up as the experts claim, what will remain of the current popular communities? Though it is true that a problem with a tremendous social network such as Facebook is that it restricts any personalization of a user’s “homepage” to a few lines describing themselves, it seems implausible that people will actually be able to “network” with all these networking sites around. Though allowing the user to be creative is certainly a feature to overlook, it is this uniformity (to a certain extent) that allows users to be part of a single network and thus meet each other. Anyone can design a website and be creative with it, but if it stands alone, it will not be visited. Small websites and groups need to stick together to have influence, or be visited, and that is the very reason these social networking communities are created. Creating many micro networking sites will be like going backwards to the times before MySpace and Facebook existed–this is simply counterintuitive.